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I’ll do anything to avoid hitting the keyboard. Anything. Eat:stuff myself, gain back the weight I lost (did I mention I’ve lost 25 pounds in 6 months?). Google for pornography. Check out the latest magazine update to arrive on my Kindle (New Yorker, Nation, Atlantic, Harper’s)-. Do my laundry-. Check out what Avis is watching on the TV. Roam outside, water the shrubberies. ANYTHING to avoid doing: this. Typing. Typing new things. Thoughts, random thoughts, much less in any wise directed thoughts;

Like for instance, what’s up with that Kindle, and hasn’t Amazon learned anything with its directed avertising? [DDET Read more…] Amazon knows just about everything there is to know about me; I’m one of their most loyal customers. But it never uses the data it gathers on me from my orders, from my browsing, to direct advertising to me on the Kindle. Email, yes: emails all the time about things I’ve ordered, things I browsed…but never on the Kindle. And the Kindle shows an ad just about every time I pick it up:–it turns itself off after about one minute, at which point an ad is displayed. But never for anything that I might find enticing.

I order from Amazon books; I’m interested in US history of the late 19th and early 20th century–I’ve got two shelf-loads of books from Amazon on that subject. And what does Kindle offer? Werewolves.

It’s also worth noting that these numbers only tell half the story: Romney has promised to offset the cost of most of his tax plan through spending cuts and tax reforms, and so any analysis of who pays is incomplete without those policies. But that information is impossible to graph, as Romney hasn’t released it yet. All we can say is that since Romney has promised to increase spending on defense and honor Medicare and Social Security’s scheduled benefits for the next decade, it’s hard to see how he makes good on that promise without cutting deep into programs for the poor and tax preferences that benefit the middle class, and if that’s right, then the poor and middle class are paying much more than you can tell from the graph above.

[There are] a number of different policies that had the effect of redistributing income upward. For example, exposing manufacturing workers to direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while protecting highly educated professionals (e.g. doctors and lawyers), would be expected to lower the wages of both manufacturing workers and the large number of workers who will compete for jobs with displaced manufacturing workers. …
Central banks that target low inflation even at the cost of higher unemployment will also increase inequality…
And when a government adopts a one-sided approach to enforcing labor laws, so that courts intervene to benefit management and weakens unions, it will reduce workers’ bargaining power. This will mean lower pay for ordinary workers and higher corporate profits and pay for those at the top…The huge paychecks of the Wall Street crew have to come from somewhere and our analysis indicates that it came from those below the 90th percentile in the income distribution…If we are serious about reducing inequality, reining in the financial sector must be a big part of the plan. And, a tax on financial speculation would be a great place to start.

Since the Great Recession officially ended in June of 2009 G.D.P., equipment investment, and total corporate profits have rebounded, and are now at their all-time highs. The employment ratio, meanwhile, has only shrunk and is now at its lowest level since the early 1980s when women had not yet entered the workforce in significant numbers. So current labor force woes are not because the economy isn’t growing, and they’re not because companies aren’t making money or spending money on equipment. They’re because these trends have become increasingly decoupled from hiring — from needing more human workers. As computers race ahead, acquiring more and more skills in pattern matching, communication, perception, and so on, I expect that this decoupling will continue, and maybe even accelerate.